The Best Defense Sidefics
by JoIsBishMyoga
Summary: Side stories and scenes for The Best Defense, a Harry Potter Yu Yu Hakusho crossover. Not Yoma's, see my profile for links. First chapter: Hoarfrost. Hermione considers her encounter with the Youko.
1. Hoarfrost

Warnings, disclaimers, blah.

TAKES PLACE AFTER: The Best Defense, Ch. 46.

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Hoarfrost

Hermione turned the page, looking at more wards, the captions and labels in a vaguely Asian calligraphy, and sighed. All the anti-demon wards worked because they hurt the victim, and these were no different than the last hundred pages' had been; no different than her Defense textbook's, than the library scrolls and books, than the other two books from the Restricted Section...

_"You. Vixen." The demon brought his other hand out from behind the tree, twisting it to reveal blood streaming from the back. "Take this off."_

Hermione shook her head, trying to shake off the memory of blood, the faint sizzling she'd heard once she'd taken the demon's hand... she, Hermione Granger, had attacked a dem-- no. A man, a person, who couldn't fight back.

"I didn't know..." she whispered.

It didn't excuse what she'd done. He hadn't been able to fight back. And the blood, and the soft sizzling; it had still been working, like acid on his skin. The pain he must have been in... all Hermione's fault.

_The demon bent closer, gold eyes burning like hoarfrost. "A secret, then..."_

But even despite that, the demon -- against all expectations, against all logic, against everything that she'd ever read about them -- had been kind, in a way. Hermione knew a teacher's corrections when she heard them. Snape would have been far nastier about her mistakes.

_"Sneaky little vixen..."_

Another page of wards, powerful to burn shadow demons... no.

_"Too smart..."_

Not smart enough... she couldn't find painless wards.

_"Take this off."_

Why did that sound more like a plea than a demand, in retrospect?

_"A secret, then..."_

The bells in the clock tower rang the hour, drawing Hermione's attention back to the material world. She found her hand pressed lightly over her school tie, warm and small and rubbing gently.

"Not again..." she muttered, pulling it away and firmly gripping the book with both hands. Every single time she thought about the demon, she found her hand splayed over the spot the demon's hand had been, right before she wrote her ward on him. "This is so _stupid--!_"

Hermione turned the page. She WOULD find a set of wards that didn't cause pain, or by Merlin she would invent them herself!

_I won't torture someone who can't fight back. Never again. NEVER._

Unnoticed, her hand crept up to press over her collarbone once more.


	2. Purity

Warnings, disclaimers, etc.

TAKES PLACE DURING: Ch. 33, "Yuletide Promise".

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Purity

Clad in a short dancing kimono, her face a mask of white facepaint, Yukina walked barefoot on the winter-cold stone floors of Hogwarts. The corridors were shadowy with the approaching night -- so much earlier than in Japan -- though a few last shafts of weak, winter-pale sunlight pierced through the south and west windows.

Tonight was the winter solstice in Ningenkai, and for the second time in her life, Yukina was here and free to celebrate it. So she'd dressed in the traditional celebration clothes for the youngest of the Koorime, the windblown "little snowflakes" who danced to honor the cold; Yukina was far older than the little snowflakes, but she alone retained her ability to dance past the age of ten.

She pushed open the massive front doors to the school, watching westward as the sun sank towards the trees. Every second dimmed the warmth of her mysterious father's genes. Every second cleared Yukina's mind. Every second strengthened her inborn connection to the frozen void. And she remembered...

_Finite power meets infinite void. Infinity wins._

A simple Koorime lesson.

_Winter is the period when the human's world tilts away from their sun. (A shudder went through the class at this word -- the source of fire and light, alien and terrible.) By turning away from their sun, they turn towards the cold of the void._

The daughters of winter were so much more than ice shades.

_We are the sisters of ice, and the granddaughters of the eternal chill of the void. The small beings in their flimsy envelope of life (another shudder went through the class) fear and hate us. They do not understand. _

The sun started to sink below the horizon.

_We are the ice. _

The last sliver of the sun vanished below the mountains.

_We are the cold. _

Yukina snapped her fans open.

_We are the void._

She stepped out onto the icy stoop, feet crunching in the snow.

_Eternal..._

Ignoring the puny, distasteful flickers of warmth and life behind the thick stones of the castle --

_Implacable..._

-- she danced.

_Empty..._

For tonight alone, Yukina was Koorime.

_Pure._


	3. Counterpoint

Warnings, disclaimers, so forth.

Counterpoint

It had all started as a game, as far as they could recall. Alone in their playpen or their toddler bed, when Mummy had been too busy with Percy or the babies, they would babble in unison, mirroring each other's clumsy movements and giggling in stereo. Often, they would trade clothes, driving the whole family mad trying to figure out if the little redheaded preschooler with the F on his shirt was really Fred, or the G was George. Not that it had ever really mattered - they knew who was who, and they were almost never apart as it was.

In later years, their game had grown in complexity, as they'd discovered the concept of counterpoint (not that they'd known the word). They'd learned to move in different, complimentary ways, the yin-and-yang of looping about each other in a mad dance of flying, or the silent stealth of pulling off a trick.

By the time they'd begun Hogwarts, they'd almost gotten the concept of speaking in single, full sentences... and if they'd slipped up and spoken in unison, or lobbed a single sentence back and forth between them every so often, their classmates grinned and laughed and passed it off as being twins.

As the years passed, they'd been in identical classes, played the same position on the Quidditch team, been forced to play as a single unit, and they'd slowly started to slip more often with their speech. No one had noticed.

At the end of fifth year, they'd gotten the same OWLs - not nearly enough by their Mum's standards - but had dropped different classes. But even the single class they didn't share (Potions for George, Arithmancy for Fred) wasn't enough to stop them. They slipped up more and more often, moving in unison, speaking in unison. No one noticed. No one cared.

Then Genkai had come, with her strange students and her talk of core magic, and she'd discovered their intertwined luck-magic. And the whole process had accelerated.

By midwinter, they'd taken to sleeping in the same bed. An elf named Dobby had been most accomodating about replacing the two student twin beds with a single, full-sized staff bed. Their roommates didn't mind. They were twins.

Late one night, scarce weeks before they graduated, they lay awake in the dark, clutching each other with the unthinking desperation of small children.

"Fred?"

"Yeah, George?"

"Are you-"

"-scared;?"

"Yeah."

"A little. But-"

"-it;'s scarier-"

"-not; to."

"Yeah."

Neither pretended not to know what the other was talking about.

"Do you think we'll-"

"-integrate; completely? No. Do you-"

"-mind;? No."

But that wasn't the question on their minds, and both knew it.

"Do you think we can-"

"-survive; apart if-"

"-one; dies?"

"... no."

"... good."

Alone in their bed, the twins mirrored each other's movements, pulling up the duvet and slowly drifting to sleep in unison.

It had all started as a game.


	4. Afterthought

Warnings, disclaimers, etc.

A/N -

- I never managed to properly explain this in BD. Something Hiei says in ep. 8, plus the sheer impossibility of a detail from the Tournament, equals...

0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0

Afterthought

It is a full week before Hiei finds himself outside a human's window, all three eyes focused on the figure within. A full week, much to his chagrin, before he'd realized there was a question that must be answered...

Hiei ties the cloth over his Jagan, automatically checking that it's fully covered, before he leaps to the windowsill and taps on the glass. The person within jumps, dropping their pencil onto their homework. Then, after a long moment, the window slides open, and Hiei gazes flatly down onto the occupant.

"...Hiei-san?"

"Yukimura," he responds.

The girl stares at him, bewildered; Hiei hadn't bothered to do more than glance at her during the Tournament. He'd certainly never greeted her or introduced himself. She probably only knows his name from the match-up board.

"Please, come in," she finally says, stepping out of the way.

Hiei shakes his head. "During the Tournament," he begins. He brushes a thumb over his headband. "Did you see this?"

Keiko tilts her head in honest confusion. "Of course. It wasn't exactly difficult to miss..."

That's not what he meant. "Did you look into it? Straight on?"

"... like I said," she responds, "It wasn't hard to miss. I mean, it glows... and it was all purple and red..."

Huh. Hiei considers this for a moment, crouching to bring himself to eye level with her. He frowns, searching her eyes for... what? "What did I do to you...?" he murmurs.

"Do to...?"

Hiei glowers her into silence. "The Jagan," he says, "this third eye. A normal human looking into it will be driven mad... or die." He pauses to let that sink in. "You're not dead."

"I..." Keiko wavers, then rallies herself. "I'm not mad, either."

"Aren't you."

"I'll tell you if I see any pink bunnies, shall I?" Keiko tells him dryly, before clapping a hand over her mouth. "Sorry. I'm sorry! I didn't mean..."

Hiei smirks. "Perhaps you're more suited to Yuusuke than I'd thought." He straightens once more. "If you plan to keep associating with him, expect whatever I did to grow stronger."


End file.
